Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Now the fun stuff

Huxster recording 11/19/2014

So many people think recording music is all fun and games. i remember being a kid and reading about Fleetwood Mac taking a year to record their "Tusk" record. i just read the Ken Scott book and he talks about taking 6 months to record Supertramp Crime of the Century which for 1974 was a very long time to record. Then there is the classic story of the Beatles recording their first record in 16 hours!!
Well speaking from my experience with Huxster our problem has been time. we all have real jobs and families as well as in the past someone all ways gets sick when it's time to record vocals. for this record we had placed a hard stop thanks to Miley Cryus of the first week of January 2014.
Our Producer/engineer Paul Hager is also her front of house engineer and she starts her world tour the end of January. so we need to have all overdubs and more importantly, edits done by Christmas. as for production on this record we are not going to go crazy. besides the standard bass, guitar and vocal overdubs there may be a little percussion and some keyboards. nothing outrageous.
But before any overdub or mix can be done i have to edit the drum takes. in the last post i mentioned the multiple drum takes of each song trying to get the "one" flawless take. to get the "one flawless take i had to weed through all of the takes to make one solid performance. that's not to say i couldn't play the song solid at least once; i did but sometimes a chorus in one take was better than another or the bridge was tighter on one than another and for the song "Guns and Roses" where i try my best to be Keith Moon.....well i had to piece several bits i liked into one.

Drums being the foundation of the song really have to be right. it would be foolish to think few drummers cut and paste sections; many of them do. again it is in the sprint of presenting to best possible performance possible. in some cases producer will actually cut and paste whole sections of songs to "improve" the song such as extend a chorus or trim the bridge or my favorite, shorten the guitar solo.

the power of computers these days gives us the flexibility to do this easily unlike back in the day of tape where you had a tape machine, splicing tape, razors and grease pencils. an edit took a long time and if you got it wrong....oops no undo key stroke.

the other great joy of recording with a computer is i can sit at home in shorts and a t-shirt and edit or pre-mix all i want. it also allows me to make mixes for review and if i missed something, no problem i can just recall and fix it.

well i'm going back to editing and getting ready to watch TV. tomorrow we start the overdub phase of the record. and that's another post for another day.